


taste the smoke

by kiiouex



Series: Rovinsky Week 2018 [2]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Depression, M/M, Off-screen bangin', Ro is in a Mood, dream stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-14
Updated: 2018-04-14
Packaged: 2019-04-22 23:53:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14319840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: The day after his father died, the day his mother stopped talking, was the last day he ever dreamed of the forest and all he came back with was a handful of grass.





	taste the smoke

**Author's Note:**

> My plan included a prompt but I forgot to follow it, so this one isn't really anything :^) time crunch fic challenge mode
> 
> thanks as usual to [tk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid), she beta-read _and_ bought me grapes

It’s late, about midnight, when Gansey gets home. Ronan hears the roar of the returning Pig from his room, wonders if Gansey’s going to come and try to talk to him or if he might get away with the pretence of sleep.

He’d skipped school, and now he’s lying on his bed with the lights off, headphones on, in the unwelcome silence of Monmouth at night. It must have been an hour since the music stopped, battery giving out, but he hasn’t made a move to charge it. There is just enough starlight in his room to cast shadows and make great and terrible shapes out of the ordinary.

He’d slept that afternoon, for a few hours, enough for dreams to come and go. Enough for him to wake up empty handed. He tries to sleep as little as possible these days.

Ronan stays sprawled on his back, tracking Gansey’s shuffling path around the main room, listening to the distinctly clumsy sounds of someone trying very hard to be quiet. Gansey must actually believe he’s asleep, which is funny and sad, and if Gansey _really_ knows Ronan he should know Ronan hasn’t even gotten out of bed for the day, except for three trips to the kitchen/bathroom. Gansey is good enough to keep the fridge stocked up for him, which he probably very badly wants to say something about but never will.

He’s a good friend. Ronan wishes he wasn’t taking this all so personally.

Ronan waits until Gansey’s settled, and then a while after that, knowing that Gansey’s sleeplessness rivals his own, and _knowing_ that Gansey stays up to play sentinel as often as he can. Like witnessing Lynch leaving at midnight gives him any power over the outing. Like the two of them are going to sit down the next day, and Gansey can make that sympathetic expression and maybe put a hand on Ronan’s knee. He could try ‘I know what you’re going through, but,’ or he could go for the classic ‘there is no excuse’ approach. Neither will work. Declan gave up months ago, because _he_ understood some losses are just too steep.

Not that Declan really empathises, though. Not like Ronan doesn’t know there’s an ugly little part of his brother that’s glad about it.

Ronan smashed the clock in his room a while back, when it seemed to be mocking his insomnia, and his phone is somewhere in the glovebox of his car where it’s cracked screen can’t taunt him. When he gets dressed, he has to sift through the clothes on the floor to find the least filthy, has to wrap himself up in leather and steel adornments and his very best ‘fuck off’ expression to make sure no one gets close enough to be trouble. He’s so sick of people, lately. His tattoo itches, and he scratches, regret as bile in his throat as he wishes he’d gotten absolutely any other pattern pressed into his skin. Wishful thinking at its finest, at least he can’t see it himself.

Monmouth is a stranger’s home at this point. Ronan stands in the doorway to his room, taking in all the evidence of Gansey’s life continuing, moving around him, papers and maps and journals and schoolwork, a world Ronan refuses to settle for. He’s eager to leave, around the sleeping Gansey, and out into the silence of a late night.

The BMW waits for him downstairs, sleek as ever, and Ronan takes his place inside, hands on the wheel, and doesn’t start the car. Sometimes he never ends up going anywhere, and the BMW is enough; he can just curl his thumbs against the impressions in the leather of the wheel and play one of the Celtic CDs from the glovebox, and feel that very last physical thread to his father right under his fingers.  

Some nights just sitting in it is enough, but he’d slept that afternoon, just a few hours, and the dream had been a regular dream, the kind people describe on tv, the kind where Ronan goes to places he sort of knows and speaks to people that are mostly themselves, and comes back holding nothing at all. The kind where he wakes up with his heart burning because he’s lost the way to the forest and it’s never coming back.

He starts the car. No guilt for Gansey, somewhere upstairs, no guilt for Declan, just the vague idea that he can out-speed grief if he can just get fast enough away. His chest feels hollow, head dull where it should be a storm of sparks, and Ronan can’t stop thinking of everything he lost.

That means going to the one person who still has it.

Kavinsky’s at a chop shop on the edge of town, a big operation with bays to spare and an endless supply of parts, no matter how rare. Ronan thinks it’s one of the better places to meet him; he likes cars, and the gasoline tang he breathes in settles something very primal in his chest that still looks for that kind of comfort.

Being out of Monmouth is good, being surrounded by mechanical mayhem is better, and Ronan skims a hand through spilt oil, fingers an engine, gets in the way of a very over-tired engineer, like he’s in no rush at all. Maybe this is how he can survive, he thinks, eying a frame laid bare and gutted on the ground, maybe he can make a hobby of Parrish’s miserable living and find a new path to creation. Cars have always seemed close enough to dreams.

But he knows it wouldn’t quite be the same.

Kavinsky’s the one to find him, and he comes smiling, all teeth. He’s always happy to see Ronan. His jeans are dark with oil from the knees down, and Ronan didn’t know that K ever got his hands dirty in a constructive way, but the look suits him. “Lynch,” Kavinsky says, either fake-friendly or real-friendly and bad at it, “It’s been a while. Thought maybe you were trying to give this up.”

Ronan doesn’t say he could kick the habit, because that’s admitting he has one, because that’s giving Kavinsky even more power over him that Kavinsky doesn’t need. “Maybe I’m here for the shop, you ever think of that?” he asks.

“We just got a nice little Mazda in,” K tells him. “If you want to drop your Beemer off you can drive out in that.” He watches the anger settle into Ronan’s shoulders at the suggestion, though Ronan restrains his response to his middle finger. His fault for saying something stupid in the first place. “I’m surprised you’re not just snapping for your fix, babe.”

“Alright, fuck, where are we going?” Ronan grates. “You got a backroom around here?”

“Unless you want to do business in a back seat,” Kavinsky counters, “Don’t _think_ anyone would look up long enough to notice. Hive of industry, this place, I give them my _very_ best.” But he jerks his head towards a quiet door before Ronan has to smack him, and Ronan does not meet any worker’s eye as he crosses the shop floor.

The back room is quiet, and heavily used by people who do not clean their overalls. One sofa, badly stained, one cluttered desk, one pin-up calendar that does not interest Ronan in the least. He throws himself into the desk chair, feeling impatience crawl under his skin now that he’s so close to what he wants.

Kavinsky takes his sweet time, locking the door and then settling onto the sofa, kneading it cat-like and doing a very good job of not looking at Ronan head-on, though his smirk gives him away. He wants Ronan to beg; Ronan wants Kavinsky to hurry the fuck up.

“Come on,” he says, wanting to prompt, not sound desperate, not sound like this is a habit he can’t kick. “It doesn’t matter if you’re comfortable when you’re fucking asleep.”

K chuckles at that, low and mean, and produces a tiny bottle of pills from his pocket. He shakes it, and the response in Ronan is downright Pavlovian, only it’s his head and his heart getting all twisted up. “What do you want, baby?” Kavinsky croons. “What kind of present should I bring back for you?”

Ronan’s heart thinks _anything_ , and Ronan’s heart thinks _flowers, blue ones_ , and his mouth says, “Something cool you piece of shit, use your own goddamned imagination.”

Kavinsky’s laugh is a crackle and then a green pill is on his tongue and he falls back on the couch, boneless, going still, all at once. In his mind, Ronan is following him, through the dark and deep woods to the grove where the magic lay, where things became real among the ferns. He missed the mist and birdsong and that otherworldly sense of time and danger that the forest always gave him. None of the real forests he had entered compared. The entire place in his mind is gone.

And Kavinsky’s there now, plundering a toaster oven or whatever the fuck else he thinks is funny. Ronan glares at the deep curve of his thrown-back head and thinks jealousy is going to sear him from the inside out. Just burn him to nothing but desperate, petty ash.

K comes back with a jerk and a gasp, and then that shark smile’s back in place before Ronan can blink, and he’s holding the prize up with both hands; a VCR player, something from the nineties, something Ronan remembers from the living room in his very old home, and he doesn’t know if Kavinsky _knows_ or if this is just a very lucky guess.

“Thought I might get you something familiar,” Kavinsky tells him, offering the prize up for Ronan’s eager fingers, “You ever had one of these? When I was a kid I watched tapes till they fell apart.”

The machine is heavy, solid, real on the inside and not just a surface job. There is nothing particularly dreamlike or unique about it, but Kavinsky’s work has never been whimsy, not like Ronan’s father could do, not like Ronan could do right up to the very worst day of his life. But it’s something. It’s an unreal thing made real, mundane or not, and Ronan sets gently it on the floor at his feet. “It’s not bad,” he says, and hopes that if he says the next part mocking enough it’ll disguise the real wish, “but get me something prettier.”

Kavinsky rolls his eyes, but Ronan can tell he’s pleased enough, and he takes another pill. Ronan regards his unconscious body and wonders, for the hundredth, thousandth time, if Kavinsky likes the show of it, performance dreaming, if it’s taunting, if he’s trying to wreck Ronan by letting him stay this close, or if he’s just so used to feeding addicts that he never even thinks about it anymore.

The unkind piece of Ronan assumes that Kavinsky does it because he knows it destroys Ronan to watch; Kavinsky is a dreamer, able to slip into that creative, productive sleep and bring back a wonder. Ronan is half a dreamer, but half a dream, and the day after his father died, the day his mother stopped talking, was the last day he ever dreamed of the forest and all he came back with was a handful of grass.

He didn’t even think to keep it. Ronan of the past was so stupid and spoiled that Ronan of the present loathes him.

Kavinsky is back with a leather-bound journal, nothing like Gansey’s but more like something Kavinsky copied from a museum, all inlaid gilt and calligraphy, content clearly second to presentation. Ronan skims the pages, feels the workmanship, tells the waiting Kavinsky, “It’s pretty.”

They play this game for a while, K dreaming, Ronan hungrily receiving every object he creates, a stack of gifts that bounce between his taste and K’s own. Of them all, his favourite is the most mocking, a switch cut from an oak tree. “Forest didn’t even know what to do when I took this,” K said when he surrendered it, “Thought I was there for the knife, but the knife was to get you something _extra_ special.”

It smells like oak sap and a tremor of mist and Ronan knows that it’s going to fade within a day, doesn’t even care that Kavinsky’s watching, he brings the branch right up to his nose and tries to feel the magic that abandoned him.

Kavinsky doesn’t get tired, but he does get bored. Making things _for_ Ronan doesn’t interest him like making things _with_ Ronan did. The gifts trend back to his interests, electronic, mechanical, chemical, and then he pockets the last without handing them over and leans back to look at Ronan, hooded eyes in a heavy face, says, “That’s all I’ve got for you, Lynch.”

It’s enough, Ronan thinks, it’s only a taste, the second-hand smoke of creation, but it can ease the ache, at least for a while. He thinks of Monmouth and Gansey and climbing back into the BMW to drive home, the car his father made, and he looks at Kavinsky and asks, “What are you doing now?”

He wants an escape and he gets it. Kavinsky is a true expert at getting people out of their heads. The dregs of the night are spent on that oil-stained carpet, heat on his skin, a million miles away from his body. All that stands out in the haze are K’s fingers on his tattoo, that sour whisper, “Did you think this would bring it back? Like your dreams just got lost and they needed a guide back into your brain?”

Ronan doesn’t think he manages a response out loud, but the thought rolls around in his skull, that he hates the tattoo and he hates himself and he hates his father for leaving him like this.

After, that gasoline-oil smell stays settled in Ronan’s head, and he closes his eyes. Not stupid enough to sleep and re-open the wound so quickly; just rest, mind and body, the raw realness of the shop beyond, that last trace of Cabeswater on Kavinsky’s skin.

 

He gets up at dawn. Everything Kavinsky made is still a pile on the floor, the tape player, the book, that single oaken twig. Ronan wants badly to leave them all behind, to not need this, to kick his fucking habit, but he gathers an armful of them and goes, hoping dully that K might not think to look for them in the morning and K might not ever know.

Back in Monmouth, Gansey splayed out on his bed and still with his glasses on, an academic starfish. Ronan looks at him for a minute too long, wonders if there’s any point in trying harder, if there could be salvation in Gansey and engines and life beyond dreams.

All of Kavinsky’s creations go with the rest, under his bed, where he doesn’t have to look at them but they can stay near. There are leaves going brown on his floorboards, and there are ferns dried to dust, the ones from the first time Kavinsky did him a favour. Electronics haunt him, practical and functional and nothing like his father made, nothing like he used to make himself. He bowls the oak branch into the back to dry up like the rest, and collapses on the mattress above.

Ronan is hollow to his bones, empty on the inside and ready for another insubstantial dream.

**Author's Note:**

> obligatory [tumblr](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/) link


End file.
